Eighty pro-choice and human rights groups including Oxfam Canada have signed an open letter applauding the government’s move to require all groups seeking funding through the Canada Summer Jobs program to sign an attestation stating they support Canadian constitutional rights as well as the right to reproductive choice.

Announced last month following a report by Global News, the attestation all groups seeking federal funding through the program are required to sign states that both the organizational mandate and duties of the job that will be funded through the grants respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is defending his decision to appoint an MP who has not supported legalized abortions to sit as chair of the Commons committee of status on the women.

Liberal MPs, who have a majority on the committee, walked out of a meeting on Tuesday after Rachael Harder, the member of Parliament for Lethbridge, was named to the position. The status of women committee is one of the few Commons committees for which the Official Opposition appoints the chair.

Scheer’s election as Conservative leader cheered by anti-abortion groups
Groups say they sold as many as 18,000 party memberships hoping to affect the outcome of the leadership race and grow the social conservative wing of the party.

By Tonda MacCharles
Ottawa Bureau reporter
Mon., May 29, 2017

OTTAWA—The election of Andrew Scheer, an avowedly anti-abortion Conservative Party leader, has cheered and emboldened anti-abortion groups who say his victory shows the growing strength of the social conservative wing of the party.

“This is what happens when pro-lifers do politics right,” said Scott Hayward, co-founder of RightNow, on his Facebook page.

The CPC's bringing back the abortion debate — bet on it
iPolitics Insights
Scheer can’t stop it — and it’s going to cripple the party in 2019

Michael Harris
Sunday, May 28th, 2017

Justin Trudeau must have slept like a baby last night. 2019 is no longer the year of living dangerously as far as the Conservative threat to his regency is concerned.

Not only did the social conservatives retain control of the Harper Party, but in Andrew Scheer, the former PM (still thought to be a behind-the-scenes puppet-master by some) likely got the candidate he wanted. At the very least, he did not get an uppity progressive like Michael Chong — who defied him in the days of Harper’s flat-out authoritarianism — or the weak tea of an Erin O’Toole.